resources to fulfil. This ‘liberty’ was the inviolability of a prelate’s or
baron’s lands, so that libertascould signify both the freedom of the
immunist to exercise jurisdiction within his territory and the immune
territory itself.^106 It is not clear which is the primary meaning when we
read that in 855 the king of the Mercians ‘wrote a liberty’ for the church
of Worcester ina number of ‘territories and places’ and two years later
added ‘a certain small portion of a liberty in the town of London’, in
which the bishop was to have scales and weights and measures to regu-
late trade ‘as is customary in a port’; or find William the Conqueror
founding the abbey and liberty of Battle, effectively creating a little
diocese and hundred of its own.^107
Grants of territorial liberty were in effect grants of public powers of
government, which was surely why a lord who wanted to ‘liberate’ a
church he had founded from ‘all episcopal and secular obligations’, as
William of Bellême did some time in the third decade of the eleventh
century, found it necessary to bring together the king of France and as
many bishops and counts as he could muster at the consecration.^108
More usually it was the king himself who granted liberties. In a charter
which he caused to be placed on the altar of the church of Saint-Pierre
at Corbie in 1075, restoring to the abbey the power of vicomteor
‘tribune’ in Corbie of which it had been deprived by the count of
Amiens, King Philip I found it necessary to say a little about ‘the liberty
of that place’ and how it had grown by royal decree.^109
The granting to great churches of ‘liberties and free customs’ (mean-
ing chiefly the exercise of justice) was an adaptation of the Frankish
immunity to a feudal age which transferred easily to England after the
Conquest. The jurisdiction of the hundred court had often come into the
hands of Anglo-Saxon lords as ‘sake and soke’, and King William must
have had this in mind when, for instance, he told an abbot that he
should hold a monastery’s lands ‘with the same law and liberty as
any of his predecessors held it in King Edward’s time or mine’.^110 The
chronicler Florence of Worcester describes how in 1070–1 Bishop
212 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^106) Formulae, 39–43; cf. Friderici I Diplomata, 1158–1167,197. 8 (secundum antiquam et
primitivam illius loci libertatem);315. 40 –316, 433.12.
(^107) EHDi, nos. 83, 85, 87, 90, 92, 95, 120; Eleanor Searle, Lordship and Community:
Battle Abbey and its Banlieu, 1066–1538(Toronto, 1974), 198–9.
(^108) Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier, pp. ccxix–ccxxxv, 428–31; J. F. Lemarignier, Le
Gouvernement royal aux premiers temps capétiens 987–1108(Paris, 1965), 89–90, n. 89.
(^109) Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier,239; cf. 65–6, 67, 110, 141, 145, 157, 179, 180, 182,
184, 198, 209–10, 225, 235, 259, 271, 295–6, 298–9, 305, 328, 339, 341, 399; Recueil des
actes de Louis VI, 1108–1137, i. 19, 22, 39, 45, 465–6.
(^110) J. Vendeuvre, ‘La “Libertas” royale des communautés réligieuses au xiesiècle’, Nouvelle
Revue Historique, 33 (1909); F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond(Cambridge UP,
1897), 80–107; H. M. Cam, Law-Finders and Law-Makers in Medieval England(London,
1962), 26; RRANi, 50–1, 60, 125 (xxiii), 127–8 (xxxiii).